However, the plaintiff muddied her own case by saying "I have a dream that God will be welcomed back in our schools again. I think we need him.'' Well, even JK Rowling gets sloppy when religious matters occur. The parallel world of Hogwarts celebrates Christmas, which rather begs the question of what God is doing among the wizard community.

I would beg to differ. Ms Mallory, deranged though she may be, is unwittingly on to something. Novels do influence our thoughts, and can even inspire us to do naughty things. We forget the roots of the novel, which are in indecency and sedition.

In 18th-century France, booksellers would use the word "libre" - from where we get "livre" - to designate a book that was going to have something both rude and politically radical in it. Until Richardson's Pamela came along, the majority of novels were works which combined salaciousness with (usually) anti-clericalism.

And even Pamela differs from its saucy predecessors only insofar as the heroine, instead of being bonked seven ways to breakfast throughout the book, as happens in de Sade or Thérèse Philosophe (the one-handed read of the mid-18th century), manages to make an honest man of her would-be seducer by marrying him.

So the novel is a moral battleground: on one side, you have novels that encourage free thought and action; on the other, those which try and make you a better person. These do not stand on some literary sideline. Sometimes the battle takes place within its very pages.

Flaubert's Emma Bovary is corrupted by reading too many novels; Dante's Paolo and Francesca are in hell because they got the horn from reading a proto-novel - the story of Lancelot - together. The novel itself did not even start to become a respectable form until Richardson, and novel-reading as a habit marked one down as indolent and suggestible for decades afterwards.

So I would say that if a novel encourages us to behave differently, whether better or worse than we normally do, it's doing its job. Just as CS Lewis hoped that we would all embrace muscular Christianity by reading the Narnia books, so William Burroughs, whose Naked Lunch came out just five years after The Last Battle, probably secretly hoped that we would become at least more sympathetic to spectacularly depraved homosexual orgies. I wonder, incidentally, which of those two books resides in the school libraries of Gwinnett County.

Sadly, only the very weak-minded will start believing in witchcraft because of Harry Potter; the prose simply isn't strong enough. But at least Laura Mallory is keeping alive the idea that reading books isn't automatically "good" - there's a possibility of moral pollution in the act as well. The main difference between Ms Mallory and myself is that I think that's a fine thing.